Variant, issue 34, Spring 2009

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Front cover & centre pages: 'Every action will be judged on the particular circumstances' by Seamus Nolan

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centre pages pdf

www.peaceontrial.com
counterpunch.org

Letters
Open Letter to Mike Russell MSP (Minister for Culture, External Affairs and the Constitution) and call for signatories, re. Promotional Culture versus Democratic Culture: The Case of Creative Scotland.

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Also see: http://creativescotland.blogspot.com

The Creativity Fix
Jamie Peck
Cogent critique of architect and popilariser of the 'creative class' thesis, Richard Florida's best selling primers on the 'creative economy'. Peck lays bare that Florida's creativity script facilitates revamped forms of civic boosterism alongside the gratification of middle-class consumption desires; lubricates flexible labour markets and gentrifying housing markets; and relegitimizes regressive social redistributions within the city.

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www.eurozine.com

Tyranny of the Ad Hoc
John Barker
"In a period of massively unequal globalization, formal institutions with at least nominal accountability have been sidelined or become expendable. Power has shifted to a raft of ad hoc outfits with grandiose names and a lack of even nominal accountability. Their effect is often diffuse, and not immediately visible. Capitalism’s protectorate demands unhindered freedom of action, happy to impose rules on others while dodging any on itself; slippery to its core. All this matters and especially now when in the economic sphere voluntary agreements, ad hoc oversight, and a lack of accountability has come to the fore."

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‘Glasgow’s Merchant City: An Artist Led Property Strategy’
Neil Gray
The potential of ‘the arts’ to rehabilitate ‘unproductive’ urban space and stimulate the property market has long been established by gimlet-eyed developers. However, rather than submit to boosterist overstatement it's more useful to contextualise the competitive creative economy mantra as the afterbirth of a wave of self-defeating entrepreneurial urban strategies which preceded it. Yet, despite increasing skepticism around hyperbolic 'creativity' claims, the creative city policy framework is still being applied by countless slow-learning cities worldwide. Despite the austere and worsening fiscal climate and the collapse of commercial property markets, and the strong correlation between inequality and 'creativity', Glasgow City Council continue to act oblivious or unconcerned...

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Artists & Art Schools: For or against innovation? A reply to NESTA
Angela McRobbie & Kirsten Forkert
The recently published report from NESTA, ‘The Art of Innovation: How Fine Arts Graduates Contribute to Innovation’, provides an opportunity to offer a series of reflections on links between the art schools and the ‘creative economy’; the nature of cultural policy and the role of consultancy research; the rise of creative labour and its social consequences.

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Hunting, Fishing, & Shooting the Working Classes
Tom Jennings
With the prospect of mass unemployment again looming – in addition to the working poor of increasingly casualised, insecure work patterns and impoverishment of substantial swaths of the population in the meantime – it's pertinent to take stock of the social-realist tradition that continues to provide visual narratives which take seriously the problems and possibilities of the everyday lives of ordinary working-class people based on purportedly accurate accounts of lived experience. Jennings sketches the patchy tradition of UK social-realism before considering a particularly consistent exponent, the Amber film collective, whose 40th anniversary is this year.

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http://www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

The Toughest Man in Cairo vs The Zionist Vegetable
Anand Balakrishnan
Anand Balakrishnan provides a thrilling pastiche of pulp non-non-fictions in this his most honest and exaggerated 'Bidoun' treatment.

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Bidoun Magazine - Art & Culture from the MIddle East
http://www.bidoun.com

Shoreditch and the creative destruction of the inner city
Benedict Seymour
In areas like London's Shoreditch and its peers around the globe, the cosmetic renewal of a portion of the crumbling urban core coincides with continued – or intensified – infrastructural decline. Rather than an unfortunate side effect of the real estate market, gentrification is an openly pursued policy objective where 'creative entrepreneurialism’ is identified as key to reviving inner cities. Gentrification takes from the poor and gives to the rich; anything residually ‘public’ will either be reclaimed for the middle class or left to rot. The question remains, is the current crisis a reprieve or a new assault, and who will win this time?

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thelondonparticular.org

The End of Israel’s Impunity?
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
For the second time in two years Israel's colonial ambition has floundered. It is losing both legitimacy and power. Support for it is dwindling in Washington; its friends are alarmed. Citizens are acting where governments have failed; the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions is snowballing. Apologists are finding it more difficult to justify its persistent criminality. This leviathan may yet be tamed, accountability restored; but what part, if any, will international law have played in this?

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pulsemedia.org
spinwatch.org